President says “some colleagues” proposed a deal several days before the opposition leader died in a Russian prison, “but unfortunately what happened, happened.”
March 18, 2024 12:45 am CET
Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly spoke Alexei Navalny’s name for the first time in years, claiming in a campaign victory press conference that he’d agreed to swap the opposition leader in a prisoner exchange days before he died in an Arctic jail.
Putin said at a press conference following his landslide win in the sham Russian election that “some colleagues” had proposed swapping Navalny several days before he died “for some people who are in prison in Western countries.” He said he agreed to the idea, as long as the opposition leader never returned to Russia, “But, unfortunately, what happened happened … It happens. What can you do? That’s life.”
Putin appeared to corroborate a claim made by a close Navalny ally, Maria Pevchikh, that Russia and Western officials had negotiated a prisoner exchange deal which would’ve seen Navalny released from Russian prison, where he was serving a harsh sentence after being found guilty of charges widely decried as politically motivated. Pevchikh said the deal included Vadim Krasikov, an FSB agent jailed in Germany for murdering a former Chechen commander in Berlin in 2019.
Pevchikh, as well as those close to the Navalny team and Western officials have blamed the opposition leader’s death on Putin, who oversaw a severe crackdown on the opposition over his years in power.
Navalny was arrested upon his return to Russia in 2021, five months after being poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent of the Novichok group. Western leaders blamed Russian authorities for the poisoning, while Navalny pointed the finger at the FSB secret service, which acts on Putin’s orders.
“As for Mr. Navalny. Yes, he passed away. This is always a sad event,” Putin said at the press conference Sunday.
Separately, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was cited by the state-run news agency TASS as saying that Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, had “the opportunity to come to Russia and see her husband, but she chose to stay abroad.”
Any visit to Russia for Navalnaya would been highly risky, given her husband’s defiance of Putin’s autocratic regime.
Navalnaya has now vowed to take up her husband’s mission to topple Putin’s regime.